Colour, Light and Wonder in Islamic Art E-Book

Idries Trevathan

• Herausgeber: Saqi Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

The experience of colour in Islamic visual culture has historically been overlooked. In this new approach, Idries Trevathan examines the language of colour in Islamic art and architecture in dialogue with its aesthetic contexts, offering insights into the pre-modern Muslim experience of interpreting colour. The seventeenth-century Shah Mosque in Isfahan, Iran, represents one of the finest examples of colour-use on a grand scale. Here, Trevathan examines the philosophical and mystical traditions that formed the mosque's backdrop. He shows how careful combinations of colour and design proportions in Islamic patterns expresses knowledge beyond that experienced in the corporeal world, offering another language with which to know and experience God. Colour thus becomes a spiritual language, calling for a re-consideration of how we read Islamic aesthetics.

Leseprobe

COLOUR, LIGHT and WONDERin ISLAMIC ART

COLOUR, LIGHT and WONDERin ISLAMIC ART

Idries Trevathan

SAQI

Saqi Books

26 Westbourne Grove

London W2 5RH

www.saqibooks.com

Published 2020 by Saqi Books

Copyright © Idries Trevathan 2020

Idries Trevathan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978 0 86356 145 0

eISBN 978 0 86356 190 0

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed by Printworks Global Ltd, London/Hong Kong.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1.The Intellectual Context

2.The Work of Art: Masjid-i Shah

3.Colour Systems

4.The Aesthetics of Colour

5.Light, Lustre and Luminosity

6.Colour and the Journey of the Mystic

7.Colour and Spirituality in the Time of the Safavids

8.Meaning within Masjid-i Shah

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Photo Credits

Index

List of Illustrations

SECTION ONE (between pages 80–81)

1.The Masjid-i Shah in 2011, seen from the Ali Qapu palace.

2.The Masjid-i Shah seen from above.

3.The entrance to the Sheikh Lutfallah mosque as seen from the Maydan, Isfahan, 2011. The entrance portal is decorated in both tile mosaic and Haft rang tiles.

4.The Masjid-i Shah’s main portal as seen from its central courtyard, Isfahan, 2011.

5.The muqarnas portal arch above the mosque’s main entrance which is described by Natanzi as ‘a clear example in its sublimity and soaring loftiness of the essential meaning of the pillar supported by heaven’. Isfahan, 2011.

6.The minarets flanking the entrance to the Masjid-i Shah, Isfahan, 2011.

7.Inside the winter prayer hall, Isfahan, 2011. The author’s impression was of being surrounded by a blue field strewn with flowers.

8.The mosque’s mihrab (niche indicating the direction of Makkah) and the minbar (pulpit), Isfahan, 2011.

9.One of the domes that can be seen in the Masjid-i Shah, Isfahan, 2011.

SECTION TWO (between pages 160–161)

10.The Sulaimaniyya Madrasa inside the Masjid-i Shah which Sheikh Baha’i helped to design and construct. According to Sheikh Baha’i ijazat (certificates), he taught students here who came from both inside and outside Safavid lands and included many of the most prominent scholars of the age including Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi (Mulla Sadra).

11.The diagram represents Ardalan’s description of Haft rang (seven colours).

12.Detail from the Ishtar Gate showing the colours night blue, turquoise, yellow, tan and white and black. In other areas green trees are depicted.

13.Craftsmen carefully cut tile mosaics from square monochrome tiles. Negin tile workshop, Isfahan, 2011.

14.Modern Haft rang tiles after firing. The tiles are now ready to be fixed to the walls of a mosque or madrasa.

15.A craftsman applying glazes to tiles. Negin tile workshop.

16.The calligrapher applies a dark outline around Arabic letters. Negin tile workshop, Isfahan, 2011.

17.The craftsman dips the clay bricks into a turquoise glaze. These tiles will be used to decorate the dome of a newly built mosque in Isfahan. Negin tile workshop.

18.A detail showing Haft rang tiles incorporated in the Masjid-i Shah.

19.The seven colours used in the Shah Mosque. These tiles were removed from the building’s main dome following a recent restoration in 2010.

20.The muqarnas ceiling in the tenth-century Cappella Palatina in Sicily.

21.This muqarnas dome in the Alhambra’s Hall of the Two Sisters would have originally been brightly coloured. The muqarnas is described by the court poet Ibn Zamrak in a nearby inscription, ‘Revolving heavenly spheres . . . radiant with enchantments vivid and hidden.’

22.Recent technical analyses performed on a variety of Islamic architectural decorative work show that craftsmen sought to create and reflect light. Material analyses on the stuccowork seen here in the Court of Lions identified a combination of gypsum, powdered marble and eggshell. The latter two additives were included to make the gypsum both harder and more reflective, thus providing greater luminosity to the colours applied which are no longer extant.

23.A painting from a copy of the Iksandar Nama, from Nizami’s Khamsa. Alexander gazes at a highly burnuished painting, holding his finger to his mouth in an expression of wonder. Date 1449–50.

24.The Ottoman Room at the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia (IAMM).

25.Bahram Gur and the Indian princess in the black pavilion. Illustrated folio from a manuscript of the Khamsa (Haft Paybar) by Nizami. Date 1584.

26.Masjid-i Shah, Isfahan, 2011. One of the side halls flanking the central courtyard.

27.A view through one of the many archways that lead through the Masjid-i Shah.

Introduction

THE CELEBRATED ART HISTORIAN JOHN GAGE offers the brilliant, but seemingly self-evident assertion that colour in art is the ‘most vivid surviving manifestation of general attitudes to colour expressed in visual form’.1 Because our experience of colour has always been commonplace, he proposes that it is through art that one can understand historic colour value and meanings. In many ways, this book is an exploration and discussion of this idea. It looks at a work of art and the materials used to create it with the aim of trying to understand the contexts that framed the aesthetic experience of colour within the premodern Islamic world. It attempts to shed light on the experience of the viewer, as well as attitudes towards colour, aesthetics and the intellectual background. This is pursued in order to understand more fully the particular use of colour in a work of art and the implications of the premodern Muslim aesthetic experience of colour more generally.

Research into colour meaning in Islamic art is worthy of greater attention. Certain aspects of the subject have occasionally engaged the attention of historians: for instance, in 2009 some of the world’s leading Islamic art historians were brought together to explore the subject further, at the Hamad Bin Khalifa Biennial Conference ‘And Diverse Are Their Hues: Colour in Islamic Art and Culture’.2 The common approach at this conference was to address colour in Islamic art in terms of historical, sociological and enumerative perspectives; however some speakers looked at colour from other perspectives, in particular, Samir Mahmoud, who drew on a range of exegesis of Qur’anic verses that explicitly refer to colour. Particular reference was made to the Sufi commentaries on the nature of colour by Islamic philosophers such as Najm al-Din Kubra (thirteenth century) and Alludawlah Simnani (fourteenth century) in their phenomenology of colours.1 Mahmoud paid attention to Henry Corbin’s ground-breaking work on these authors in his The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism and other essays where Corbin explores, amongst other things, parallels between these Sufi texts and Goethe’s Farbenlehre. Mahmoud asked the pertinent question, central to this work, whether such theoretical treatises on colour reveal anything about the use and meaning of colour in Islamic art. Mahmoud was not intending to provide a final answer to the question, but to contribute to the debate and, in his words, to ‘rehearse many of the arguments put forward by Henry Corbin with the intention of placing his work on colour theory back in the limelight after years of neglect’.2 Nevertheless, the subject has remained largely unexplored.

Interestingly, although he has not focused specifically on Islamic art, John Gage more than anyone else has furthered the study of colour in art by providing clear and coherent commentaries on a historical understanding of colour in his two books Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism and Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction.3 These two volumes necessarily span a wide range of issues including Greek colour theory, mosaics, stained glass, heraldry, the rainbow, colour vocabulary, chemistry of pigments, and correlation of colour with music. A notable success in Gage’s work, which this study attempts to replicate, was his capacity to consider the wider context by investigating how various colour disciplines, in particular the scientific and philosophical, were once incorporated and interrelated through art. Although his interest in Islamic visual culture was only fleeting, his ability to bring a more nuanced understanding to this topic can be attributed to his multi-disciplinary approach and his assertion that because premodern man’s experience of colour was commonplace and available to most people, ‘It is an aesthetic intent which gave it value. It is in pictures, or when we see in terms of pictures, that these colour relationships take on coherence. Hence the central importance of art for the study of colour in the larger social context.’1 Therefore, although Gage was primarily interested in investigating colour meaning in art, he hypothesised that since colour has a vivid life outside the realm of art, its problems cannot be understood exclusively from within the history and theory of art itself. Thus, he suggests that, at least in respect to colour, theory and history must be seen to be part of a larger picture.2

It would seem natural to assume that any art historian would examine art in relation to the larger picture, including contemporary texts, in order to consider the intellectual context of the period in question. Yet, in relation to colour, this approach is surprisingly novel in the study of Western art and uncommon in the study of Islamic art. Referencing the wider historical, social and cultural contexts is highly pertinent to the study of colour in Islamic art since very little is available in the way of artistic and aesthetic treatises. Yet few attempts have been made to discover the relationship between an Islamic understanding of colour and what is evident in the works of art themselves. This raises the question whether using the artwork itself to look at colour perception might enable scholars to understand ways in which premodern Muslims expressed ideas about colour from within their own aesthetic context.

The present work aims to understand colour in relation to the Islamic artists’ worldview. The work of Gage presents a model, not only in relation to his findings on colour in art and culture, but also his integrative approach, that draws on a range of intellectual and historical disciplines including science, philosophy, religion and art. Using the artwork itself to look at aesthetic contexts in relation to colour will enable this study to further understand the ways premodern Muslims may have understood and engaged with colour in art.

The scope of this book is at the same time broad and intentionally limited. Broad, because it looks at colour, which is a phenomenon forming part of basic human experience, by examining ideas, objects and buildings that span continents and large swathes of history, and limited, because the subject of colour is so vast as to make any exhaustive treatment unattainable. The intention here is to examine Islamic ideas about colour through the prism of one building: the seventeenth-century Masjid-i Shah in Isfahan. Representing one of the finest examples of colour use on a grand scale anywhere, this mosque bears witness to a long and celebrated tilemaking tradition that possessed a highly sophisticated knowledge of the laws of colour, both technically and aesthetically. According to the great historian of Persia Arthur Pope, the saturation and intensity of harmonious colours found on the Masjid-i Shah (Shah Mosque) is no less than a

culmination of a thousand years of mosque building in Persia . . . the formative traditions, the religious ideals, usage and meanings [and the] ornamentation are all fulfilled and unified in the Masjid-i-Shah, the majesty and splendour of which places it among the world’s greatest buildings.1

This technical and aesthetic peak did not arise in cultural or scientific isolation but emerged alongside, or as a result of, a great culmination of metaphysical writings on light and colour by some of the most important scholars in Islamic and Persian history.

The Safavid era is marked by a coalescence of four prominent Islamic schools of thought that placed light and colour at the core of their writings: the Ishraqi (Illuminist) School of Suhrawardi; the Irfani (gnostic) School of Ibn ‘Arabi; the Peripatetic School of Ibn Sina; and the School of Kalam (theology) of al-Ghazali. In addition, an intellectual edifice which has its basis in the teachings of the above schools, as well as the specific tenets of Shi‘ism as found in the Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet and Imams, reached its completion. A synthesis is created which reflects a millennium of Islamic intellectual life.2 During the Safavid period, with the artistic and intellectual renaissance that took place, the philosophy of these schools of thought received special attention from such influential figures as Mir Damad and Mulla Sadra. These philosophers, as well as the grand architect of the Masjid-i Shah, Sheikh Baha’i al-Din al-Amili’s (henceforth Sheikh Baha’i), founded what is now known as ‘The Isfahan School of Philosophy’. According to Seyyed Hossein Nasr, this school was patronised by the court of Shah ‘Abbas, centred in the new Safavid capital of Isfahan, and initiated as part of the wider Safavid cultural renaissance associated with his reign.1 Speaking about the Safavid use of colour, the Iranian architect Ardalan suggests that the synthesis of philosophy and wisdom proffered by the School of Isfahan ‘provokes an art that seeks to saturate the senses and produces the heralded miniatures of Sultan Muhammad, the Ardabil carpet, the gardens of Fin and the Hasht Bihisht, the Masjid-i Shah and the harmonic synthesis of the Safavid city of Isfahan’.2 Moreover, according to Nasr, the Safavid period provides ‘evident proof of the relationship between Islamic spirituality and intellectuality on the one hand and art on the other’, whilst in other Islamic periods the oral tradition has left no direct written trace to enable this relationship to be studied in detail by historians.3 This work considers these various philosophies and wisdom traditions, as well as their integration during the Safavid period, as part of the wider intellectual context surrounding the aesthetic experience of colour, particularly in relation to the Masjid-i Shah.

In order to understand more about how contemporary viewers may have experienced the materials employed in the decoration of the building, I attempt to excavate descriptions of coloured materials that would have been experienced similarly to the colourful glazed tilework used in the Masjid-i Shah. Such descriptions are drawn from a variety of sources, including travelogues and histories as well as the classical Arabic dictionaries, notably the Lisan al-Arab (Arab Tongue).4 Descriptions of buildings and objects are taken from travelogues which include the eleventh-century writings of Nasir-i Khusraw, those of the thirteenth-century traveller Ibn Jubayr and the seventeenth-century traveller Evliya Celebi. I also include some terms taken from Arabic poetry that describe and evaluate colours, since the language and outlook of the Arab world provided a cultural heritage for the wider Islamic world including that of the Safavids. Attention is given to writings that address physical and physiological aspects of the experience of colour. Examples of this type of literature include lapidaries by Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (d. 1274), Kashani (d. 1258) and Nishaburi (d. 1300) and artistic treatises by Safavid court calligraphers and artists such as Sadiki Beg (d. 1610) and Dust Muhammad (d. 1565), all of which describe different aspects of either colour mixtures, making paint or painting. This category also includes Ibn al-Haytham’s Kitab al-Manazir (his treatise on optics) and the encyclopaedic Rasa’il (Epistles) of the Ikhwan al-Safa (Brethren of Purity), in which they examine visual and aesthetic perception.

Yet another type of literature reviewed addresses the experience of colour in relation to knowledge and knowing. Examples of this type of literature can be found in mystical and theosophical treatises by Sufi practitioners such as Najm al-Din Kubra in his Fawatih al-Jamal wa Fawatih al-Jalal (Aromas of Beauty and Preambles of Majesty), Suhrawardi’s recital Aql-Surkh (The Red Intellect), as well as Muhammad Karim-Khan Kirmani’s Risalat al-Yaqutat al-Hamra (The Book of the Red Hyacinth). As part of the wider discussion of the Safavid period with its artistic and intellectual renaissance, comparisons are also made between the principal decorative technique Haft rang employed in the Masjid-i Shah and the wide distribution and celebration of earlier works such as the twelfth-century poem Haft Paykar (Seven Portraits) by the Persian poet Nizami. This epic poem uses the seven colours of the Haft rang colour system and draws analogies between the application of glazes on tiles and the process of spiritual transformation. Significantly, the poet associates all of this with the Prophet Muhammad’s bestowal of colour on the seven planets during his ascension to heaven (Mi’raj) following the Night Journey (Isra’a).

Although the literature referenced may fall under different disciplines and categories, it is understood in this research as part of an interrelated process that documents the premodern Islamic engagement with light and colour. This is related to Berlekamp’s suggestion that the premodern Islamic engagement with the world was a ‘coherent symbiosis’ in which the visual, intellectual and spiritual modes of engagement are conceived as successive steps.1 Therefore, by the term aesthetics, I refer not only to sense perception and sensual experience leading to discursive knowledge (judgment, taste, etc) but also the relationship of these experiences with immaterial or non-corporeal knowledge. For as Valerie Gonzalez observes in her book Beauty and Islam, the premodern understanding of aesthetics was integrative of a wider intellectual context that does not assume separateness of the (aesthetic) object of study. Discussing aesthetics in premodern Islamic contexts she writes: ‘Aesthetics . . . manifests itself in the dual problem of physical beauty and divine beauty, and sensory perception and inner perception.’2 An attempt is made here to apply the concept of ‘coherent symbiosis’ to the aesthetic experience of colour.3 So this book does not see irreconcilable differences between the various premodern Islamic writings on colour, but treats them as situated on different but ultimately connected planes of experience and understanding.

In order to interpret and extrapolate on these primary texts, I rely heavily on secondary sources who write on Islamic aesthetics such as Necipoğlu, Akkach, Gonzalez and Elias. The work of these scholars has dramatically opened up the subject and provided new methodological tools that complement the field’s long-standing art historical approach. I draw on their findings but also the methodologies employed which examine classical Islamic thought in the light of contemporary theories. In so doing, they demonstrate the value of seeing the subject within a much wider context of parallel thinking.

In addition, this research is not restricted to Islamic texts, but also borrows ideas from studies that address similar questions in Christian art and architecture and from seminal studies on medieval aesthetics, in particular Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages and Etudes d’esthetique medievale by Umberto Eco and Edgar De Bruyne respectively.4 This study asserts that Islamic ideas regarding colour, whilst specific to the Islamic world, did not emerge in a vacuum but were preceded by rich Christian and Classical traditions. Therefore, beyond attempting to investigate the intellectual context that was specific to the premodern Islamic world, this study also investigates the possibility that writers on Christian aesthetics have encountered many of the same misconceptions and methodological problems in their own fields of study, albeit decades earlier. Indeed one motive underlying this work, and the work of De Bruyne and Eco, is a desire to correct the misinterpretation by other scholars who have tried to reduce the aesthetic delights of medieval man to shallow sensual enjoyment, or what De Bruyne has described as ‘the joy of “gold and glitter”’.1 A review of publications in Byzantine studies in relation to medieval aesthetic experience has shown that this was a tendency. It has therefore been helpful to see how some Byzantine scholars have tried to develop new approaches in order to gain a fuller understanding of their own field. For example, Liz James sees the current discourse in the study of Byzantine art as the ‘legacy’ of nineteenth-century scholars whom she describes as desirous of ‘fixed order . . . a scheme into which everything fits neatly’ and with ‘the “scientific” cast of mind, in which nothing is valid unless defined and categorized’.2 James sees this approach as insufficient in that it does not take into account Byzantine society, which she describes as ‘A society in which multiple references and associations were keenly appreciated, and limitations of category avoided’.3 Her observations could also be applied to the study of Islamic art and aesthetics. As the same could be said of the study of aesthetics in premodern Islamic contexts, this then raises questions about the potential dangers in interpreting all Islamic artworks using just one approach. More particularly, does the interpretation of Islamic artworks using just one model run the risk of missing some of its most powerful characteristics whose meaning may not be fixed or as easily identifiable as the use of colour in abstract patterns?

This study also provides a more detailed consideration of the materials used to create the work of art and information about their attainment and use by the artist. Scant attention has been given to how artists and craftsmen obtained and prepared their colours. This gap in knowledge is indicative of a wider problem which the art historian John Gage bemoans as one of the least studied aspects of the history of art – namely, its materials and tools. Whilst the specialist on impressionist painting Anthea Callen states:

Ironically, people who write on art frequently overlook the practical side of their craft, often concentrating solely on stylistic, literary or formal qualities in their discussion of painting. As a result, unnecessary errors and misunderstandings have grown up in art history, only to be reiterated by succeeding generations of writers. Any work of art is determined first and foremost by the materials available to the artist, and by the artist’s ability to manipulate those materials. Thus only when the limitations imposed by artists’ materials and social conditions are taken into account can the aesthetic preoccupations, and the place of art in history, be adequately understood.1

Rather than looking at colour merely in terms of its historical deployment in relation to particular artifacts and techniques, this study attempts to compare theoretical literature (the text) with the process of the creation and application of colour in art (the materials). By looking at possible connections between the colours used during a particular time period in relation to theoretical texts from the same time and in relation to the actual sourcing and process of producing the colours based on scientific material analysis, it was possible to make connections between these three areas. This investigation has tried to address the craftsmen’s colours not simply as abstract hues, unconnected to the intellectual and aesthetic context, but as repositories of values in their own right. The scientific analysis of artists’ materials has brought about some new concreteness, in terms of actual materials and techniques, to the historical understanding of aesthetical concepts in Islamic art.

Scope Versus Limitations

Defining the scope of this study, which examines the wider context surrounding the premodern Muslim engagement with colour, presented many challenges. The study of colour encompasses a vast number of aspects. Therefore this study was forced to be broad and discursive in its approach. Since the texts examined incorporate rich scientific, philosophical and religious dimensions, it is necessary at this initial stage to take a broad view of such writings by making general connections between ideas and objects of the same milieu of premodern Islam. The wide-ranging and disparate comparisons between ideas, other texts and art and artistic materials are made with the intention of opening up possibilities of finding good questions, and suggesting and testing a lens through which concrete cases can be further scrutinised and elucidated by others.

The question of whether or not the colour concepts and ideas found in the literature were shared amongst the general population, particular groups or specific persons, including artists and craftsmen, is not addressed. This study seeks to draw connections between texts of various types, artwork and materials, to consider broad attitudes about colour. Different sources and lines of research would be needed to establish whether a text was read and used by an architect or craftsman. My approach is in accord with the observation by Islamic art historian Necipoğlu that, regardless of whether particular mystical and philosophical texts actually exercised a direct influence on builders and decorators, the ideas and concepts presented in these writings provide ‘fragmentary glimpses into widespread aesthetic sensibilities that acted as a general backdrop against which visual idioms were formulated and reformulated in specific historical contexts’.1

Finally, a twenty-first-century understanding of earlier premodern perceptions of colour remains a twenty-first-century engagement. Conditions have irreversibly altered the ability to understand fully the premodern Islamic aesthetic perception of colour in art and architecture. Samer Akkach argues that ‘what in a premodern context used to be intuitively available has now become the object of discursive understanding’. He continues: ‘It is, therefore, important to stress that the barrier of consciousness that is commonly recognised today as separating modern subjects from their traditions must also be seen as distancing them from the immediacy of symbolism.’1

Chapter Outline

Chapter 1 aims to provide a brief assessment of what is being done by scholars in the field of Islamic art to address colour, as well as discussing the strengths and weaknesses of their methodological approaches more generally.

Chapter 2, ‘The Work of Art: Masjid-i Shah’, begins to look more closely at the work of art that provides the focus for the study. The chapter introduces the historical setting and the wider social, artistic and intellectual context of seventeenth-century Safavid Isfahan, including what is known about the building itself and its construction, drawing on primary sources and the recent work of art historians. Some of the key personalities associated with the building are introduced, along with some discussion of their role in the intellectual life of Safavid Iran. Attention is also given to methods and materials used in the decoration of the mosque, in particular its Haft rang (Seven colour) tiles. This chapter lays the foundation for the study and attempts to situate the mosque with particular reference to contemporary writings and personalities that had a bearing on the topic of colour in both visual art and philosophy.

Acknowledging that the remarkable intellectual and artistic developments that took place in the seventeenth century under Safavid rule were the result of the amalgamation of learning and practices of previous centuries, Chapter 3 ‘Colour Systems’, takes a step back to look at the broader context and particularly at earlier conceptions of colour, beginning with a brief review of colour as mentioned in the Qur’an. It then examines colour theory and process in some early scientific and artistic treatises that present colour systems, similar or comparable to modern standard colour theories of today, including treatises by, but not limited to, Ibn Sina and Nishaburi. A review of these texts provides the reader with a basis on which to build a genuine understanding of what colour might have meant in relation to premodern Muslim Islamic sensibilities, visual perception and aesthetic experience.

Chapter 4, ‘The Aesthetics of Colour’, begins to look more closely at the aesthetic experience of colour, situating it within, and in contrast to, other fundamental and established aesthetic concepts in the periods before, leading up to and during the Safavid period. It examines key theories pertaining to visual perception in general. In particular it introduces the work of the tenth-century scientist Ibn al-Haytham in his Kitab al-Manazir, which connects theories of perception with aesthetics and provides a starting point for the consideration of the perception of colour. To help in interpreting the work of al-Haytham, his work is compared with the work of others, such as the Rasa’il (Epistles) produced by group of intellectuals known as the Ikhwan al-Safa (Brethren of Purity), particularly in relation to the comparison of the perception of colour with the perception of proportion or ‘qualitative aesthetics’ with ‘quantitative aesthetics’. The chapter ends with discussion of Ibn al Haytham’s theory of perception focusing on the experience of ‘contemplative perception’ or the contemplative gaze.

Chapter 5, ‘Light, Lustre and Luminosity’, moves on from textual discussions of perception of colour to place focus back onto materials and explore how the materials themselves related to the aesthetic experience, particularly the experience of ‘contemplative perception’ discussed in Chapter 4. The first sections of the chapter focus on texts that describe how colour was seen and experienced by contemporaries on a more prosaic and everyday level and some associations with light. To begin to understand colour from the premodern Islamic perspective it is important to understand the linguistic categories available to describe it. Thus questions are asked about what words were used to describe colours in the Arab and Persian world, particularly in relation to art and architecture. What adjectives were used in conjunction with colours and what did they mean? More specifically, I scrutinise how experience of colour affects descriptions of Islamic buildings. As descriptions of colours in architecture are rare in the written sources, the research turns to discussions of materials with attributes similar to glazed tilework in order to excavate many of the terms that may have been used to describe buildings like the Masjid-i Shah. Descriptions and terms are drawn from a variety of sources including histories, travelogues and poetry, as well as the classical Arabic dictionaries. The discussion is broadened to consider Byzantine descriptions of Islamic muqarnas domes as well, grounding this discourse in the premodern Islamic intellectual climate and shedding light on the aesthetic dimension of colour use in materials and surfaces similar to glazed tiles. Bringing together all of these descriptions of materials and experiences leads to consideration of the experience of ‘awe’ or ‘wonder’ that is often described in relation to particular materials. Such accounts are then compared with several material studies that suggest an inclination towards creating luminosity and an intention to elicit a particular experience of the object. In the final section of the chapter, this is all brought together through consideration of some short texts that suggest connections between artists, the materials used, the experience of wonder or awe and spiritual striving, thus linking with the following chapter where this will be considered in further detail.

Chapter 6, ‘Colour and the Journey of the Mystic’, builds on the findings presented in previous chapters and considers further the implications of the experience of luminous colour in relation to wonderment and the contemplative gaze. This chapter looks more specifically at premodern Islamic writings about light in relation to the question of colour, particularly at texts that relate light and colour to immaterial concepts. A discussion of Neoplatonic cosmology and ontology provides the foundation for consideration of the texts and the relationship between light and colour in a premodern context. Then the idea of a connection between colour and transformations of colour and levels of understanding of the spiritual wayfarer is introduced, both in relation to the work of the artists seen as a form of alchemy and through consideration of extracts from Sufi texts which mention colour by authors such as Suhrawardi, Razi and Tusi. Finally, the chapter turns to the work of the Persian mystic Najmaddin Kubra and the popular poet Nizami to consider the correlation between colour transformations and spiritual wayfaring as found in their work.

Chapter 7, ‘Colour and Spirituality at the Time of the Safavids’, shifts its attention to the intellectual life of Safavid Isfahan at the time of the construction of the building. A look at the artwork and artistic production alongside the philosophical and religious, or in this case theosophical, concepts focuses on the work of artists and Sufi leaders and sages connected with the Masjid-i Shah as well, as with the so-called School of Isfahan which developed and flourished at this time. The chapter then addresses Henry Corbin’s understanding of the mundus imaginalis and considers the writings of Safavid artists during this period in relation to this intermediary world. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the nineteenth-century Risalat al-Yaqutat al-Hamra (Book of the Red Hyacinth) by the Persian sheikh, Muhammad Karim Kirmani, as it represents an important culmination of ideas and sources relevant for a complete understanding of the premodern Islamic mind in its intellectualised and mystical perception of colour and light.

Finally, in Chapter 8, the study returns to the work of art, the Masjid-i Shah, to reconsider the building based on the key ideas discussed in earlier chapters. It explores how Masjid-i Shah can be understood in relation to a contemporary aesthetic context, with a particular focus on its Haft rang tiles and the way the building’s colours may have been experienced and understood by contemporaries. This seventeenth-century Safavid mosque allows us to examine the various theoretical colour ideas presented, and the dimensions of the building as both a work of art and as a result of Islamic aesthetic conceptions of colour finally emerge.

1.J. Gage, Color and Culture, Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction. London: Thames & Hudson, 1993, p. 64.

2.Conference proceedings were published as Jonathan M. Bloom and Sheila S. Blair (eds), And Diverse Are Their Hues: Color in Islamic Art and Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

1.Corbin discusses both Simnani and Kubra in his Man of Light in Iranian Sufism. Trans. Nancy Person. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1978.

2.Quotation is taken from the abstract of Samir Mahmoud’s paper, ‘Color, Symbolism, and the Mystic Quest: the Spiritual Exegesis of Color in Sufism in the Works of Henry Corbin’, in Bloom and Blair, And Diverse Are Their Hues.

3.Gage, Color and Culture, and Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

1.Gage, Color and Culture, pp. 7–9.

2.Gage, Color and Meaning, p. 9.

1.Arthur Upham Pope, Persian Architecture: The Triumph of Form and Color. New York: George Braziller, 1965, p. 210.

2.Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ‘Spiritual Movements, Philosophy and Theology in the Safavid Period’, in P. Jackson and L. Lockhart (eds), Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 163.

1.Nasr, ‘Spiritual Movements’, pp. 656–97, and Andrew J. Newman, ‘Towards a Reconsideration of the “Isfahan School of Philosophy”: Shaykh Bahaʾi and the Role of the Safawid ʿUlamā’, in Muhammad Kazem Rahmati (ed.), At the Nexus of Traditions in Safavid Iran: The Career and Thought of Shaykh Baha’i Al-Din Al-Amili. Trans. Devin J. Stewart. Qum: Academy of Islamic Sciences and Culture, 2008, pp. 165–99. Also see Nasr’s book Three Muslim Sages: Avicenna, Suhrawardi and Ibn Arabi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964.

2.Nader Ardalan, ‘Color in Safavid Architecture: The Poetic Diffusion of Light’, Iranian Studies 7(1–2) (1974), p. 174.

3.Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic Art and Spirituality. Ipswich: Golgonooza, 1987, p. 9.

4.The Lisan al-Arab (The Arab Tongue) was completed by the North African Ibn Manzur in 1290. Occupying 20 printed book volumes (in the most frequently cited edition), it is the most well-known dictionary of the Arabic language.

1.Persis Berlekamp, Wonder, Image, and Cosmos in Medieval Islam. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011, p. 21. Berlekamp argues that the modern mind has difficulty in reaching a coherent symbiosis because of its tendency ‘to conceptualize the intellectual, the ethical or the spiritual, and the visual as distinct registers of human engagement with the world’.

2.Valerie Gonzalez, Beauty and Islam: Aesthetics in Islamic Art and Architecture. London: I.B. Tauris, 2001.

3.Berlekamp, Wonder, Image, and Cosmos, p. 21.

4.Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. Trans. Hugh Bredin. New Haven: Yale Nota Bene, 2002. Edgar De Bruyne, Etudes d’esthétique medievale. 2 vols, 2nd edn. Paris: Albin Michel, 1998.

1.De Bruyne argued that many historians ‘such as Chambers, reduced all aesthetical feelings referred to in Medieval Age to the joy of “Gold and Glitter”’. Etudes, vol. 1, p. 298. Trans. Claudio Cravero.

2.Liz James, Light and Color in Byzantine Art. Clarendon Studies in the History of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996, pp. 69, 107.

3.Ibid., p. 112.

1.Anthea Callen, Techniques of the Impressionists. London: New Burlington Books, 1978, p. 6.

1.See discussion in Gülru Necipoğlu, The Topkapı Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture. Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. 1995, pp. 217–23.

1.Samer Akkach, Cosmology and Architecture in Premodern Islam: An Architectural Reading on Mystical Ideas. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005, p. 17.

ONE

The Intellectual Context

WHILST GAGE’S RESEARCH DESCRIBED in the Introduction touched upon the question of perception in relation to colour in the Islamic world beyond the merely descriptive, the scholarship within the discipline of Islamic art history itself is less developed. This absence or unwillingness to address the more elusive questions about how colour may have been seen and experienced may stem from a lack of focus on the wider context of Islam, which in turn may even be the result of a somewhat incomplete or outdated methodology. This chapter aims to provide a brief assessment of what is being done by scholars in the field to address colour, as well as discussing the strengths and weaknesses of their methodological approaches. It identifies three broad catregories: art-historical, perennialist and aesthetic. Whilst some of the authors examined in this contextual review may not necessarily accept such labels, they have nevertheless been grouped together on the basis that they share similarities in their approach and methodology.

In particular, the review will focus on the recent rise in interest in the field of aesthetics of the Islamic world. There have been some notable attempts to capture the aesthetic experience and perception of works of art from the viewpoint of contemporaries, as for instance in Gülru Necipoğlu’s recent analyses of the Topkapı scroll in which she draws attention to the ‘anagogical’ aspect of geometry in Islamic art1 and Valerie Gonzalez in her treatment of the Alhambra as a dynamic system of visual and textual metaphors, which she suggests conditioned the experience of the building both on perceptual and cognitive levels.1 This study proposes to apply a similar approach to gain new ground in the understanding of colour in Islamic art.

Art-Historical Approach

As Itten seems to suggest in The Art of Color, scholars today are increasingly attracted to the discord of meanings produced by colour and a vast body of literature has been produced across many divergent disciplines. Itten notes:

The physicist who studies electro-magnetic energy vibrations, measuring and classifying colors; the chemist who studies molecular structure of dyes and pigments, color fastness and fugitiveness, synthetic and natural dyes, the physiologist who studies the light and color effects on the eye and the brain, chromatic color vision and after images; while the psychologist studies the influence of color radiation on the mind and spirit, color symbolism and expressive color effects. The artist uses both eye and brain to discover the relationships of color agents and their effects on man.2

For those studying colour in art, these many facets make the subject often bewildering and an intellectual quagmire because of the tendency of these divergent disciplines to polarise claims of knowledge on the subject – a situation attested to by philosophical and scientific literature from the ancient world to the present day.3 Within the field of Islamic art history, the situation is no more cohesive, as is evidenced by the cacophony of papers presented at the Hamad Bin Khalifa Biennial Conference ‘And Diverse Are Their Hues: Colour in Islamic Art and Culture’. In their introduction to the conference and in the subsequent publication, Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair dismissed any notions that the premodern Islamic understanding of colour was at all uniform. They described:

The various Islamic cultures, spanning more than fourteen hundred years from Arabia to Morocco and Mali and to Malaysia and Mongolia, may have perceived and thought of colour in several different ways; it should also be expected that any one of these ways may have been very different from those that are familiar today.1

Despite this, there were attempts by some speakers such as Samir Mahmoud and Olga Bush to examine more inclusive and broader pan-Islamic questions and themes that conceptually draw on shared sources such as Qur’anic verses and exegeses, Sufi commentaries as well as scientific and philosophical texts, suggesting that perhaps a more coherent and unified understanding of colour may have existed in the premodern Islamic world. For example, Olga Bush examined medieval scientific and philosophical texts with the intention of building a theoretical foundation for the premodern aesthetic experience of colour in geometric designs found in the Alhambra palace.2 Significantly for this study, she employed an innovative methodological approach, which examined scientific and philosophical ideas of the medieval period, particularly Ibn al-Haytham’s Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics), in relation to the use and meaning of colour in the Alhambra. After comparing this text with the work of art, Bush argues: ‘The work that these unknown artists left behind clearly attests to systematic design principles, principles that may be articulated coherently by reference to Ibn al-Haytham’s optics.’3 This statement is backed up by references to recent work by other researchers who identified light-reflective materials much of the stucco decoration at the Alhambra palace. Bush sees this as evidence of ‘a level of craft that speaks to the awareness of the science of optics in the period and more particularly to the importance of luminosity to the aesthetics of colour’.1 In other words, by comparing texts, artwork and material data, Bush theorises that medieval Islamic visual perceptions, and that of Ibn al-Haytham, were intentionally incorporated into the decoration of the Alhambra. The implication for the present research is that other Islamic art may also have been designed to take account of the processes of visual perception outlined in the work of Ibn al-Haytham and his contemporaries. This then raises the question as to what can be gained by further applying this type of approach, one which references the wider intellectual context of Islam. How can the study of colour in art and its relation to textual sources help us understand whether or how premodern Muslims perceived and thought about colours in ways very different from today, as Blair and Bloom suggest?

For some art historians, the discursive and integrative approach employed by Bush is considered problematic because it attempts to ascribe meaning to a merely decorative artform. The question of whether Islamic art has any meaning beyond the purely decorative is a fiercely debated and highly contentious one. At its root is the widely held belief that Islam, unlike other religions, did not concern itself with architecture or art as expressions or applications of doctrine or religious ideals and consequently Muslims did not hand down a body of texts that addressed such matters. Indeed, one of the challenges faced in this study of colour in Islamic art is that no texts have been found with which to focus or substantiate a philosophical theory of art or aesthetic theory similar to those of Vitruvius or Alberti in the Latin West.2

This presents scholars with an enigma for, despite the arts being enjoyed and promoted widely in Islamic culture, very little literary evidence has been found thus far to suggest that recorded theories or systems informed the process of architectural or artistic practice.3 This lack of texts and documentation has caused most Islamic art historians to focus solely on formalistic enquiries that trace origins and developments, analyse forms and make comparisons between artworks and architecture. Mainstream Islamic art analysis has remained rooted in taxonomic descriptions and, by default, avoids any inclination towards an aesthetic and semiotic interpretation. The common methodological approach has remained one of extreme caution, with a disinclination to generalise and a fiercely empirical attitude to the facts. The task of the historian, in the majority of writings within Islamic art-historical discourse, is not to judge and evaluate but establish whatever ‘objective facts’ may be derived from the remaining historical sources. Therefore, with the occasional exception, most books on Islamic art are limited to simply describing the artifacts and linking them with their historical context and methods of production. Gülru Necipoğlu, one of the leading commentators on methodological and historiographical issues involved in the study of Islamic art, describes the traditional art-historical approach as one that ‘treats (Islamic) buildings and objects as items to be catalogued in terms of geographic regions, style, typology, inscriptions, decorative techniques, and factual data on artist and patrons’.1 Whilst this predominant approach, which Necipoğlu labels as ‘positivist’, sets a standard of clarity and objectivity, intended to provide a system of checks and balances against the excesses of interpretation, it does not clarify the issue of how colour in art and architecture may have been experienced and perceived. The result, unsurprisingly, is that colour is normally consigned to a merely secondary role as an aspect of decorative artforms.2

This limited view of the role of colour has not been questioned by other art historians who have attempted superficial studies into the presence of symbolism in Islamic art. One of the first was Thomas Arnold,1 who categorically stated:

The religion of Islam has never encouraged the use of any kind of religious symbolism, and this lack of any kind of characteristic symbolism has distinguished Islam from most other religions. Some explanation of this phenomenon may be found by the well-known hostility of Muslim theologians to all forms of representation of living objects, whether human or animal, for a religion without iconography is unlikely to develop a symbolism.2

More recently, historians such as Ettinghausen theorised that, whilst symbolism may have been present, it did not hold much significance within the tradition.3 Others have been more adamant about the question of symbolism, particularly in relation to how Islamic art was experienced and understood. For example, Doris Behrens-Abouseif asserts:

Unlike the arts of other traditions, Islamic art cannot be interpreted as a form of religious worship or of communicating with the Divine, but rather as an aesthetic medium used for displaying pleasing things, artfully produced, either for pleasure or for donation as a pious act. The arts of the Arabs are not metaphoric, not to be understood as revelations of universal wisdom; they were not intended to mean anything other than themselves. In this context it is the user that bestows moral significance to the work of art. As a profane discipline it obeys only the criteria of the specialist and the technicians of each genre and the patron’s judgment.1

In short, according to Behrens-Abouseif, the measure of Islamic art including the use of colour is its sensual appeal and its expression of power, prestige, opulence and sensuousness.2 For Behrens-Abouseif, the aesthetic is understood as limited to the level of sensual engagement.

Some Islamic art historians not only deny any symbolic or intellectual content, but are hostile to others who attempt to consider these possibilities in relation to art, such as the Perennialist School, which this chapter will go on to review shortly. For example, Oleg Grabar in ‘Symbols and Signs in Islamic Architecture’ and The Mediation of Ornament provides a critique of what he refers to as the ‘symbolic’ interpretation by the ‘Perennialist school’, identifying several problems in their methodological approach. First, he rightly cites a lack of supporting evidence for any symbolic analysis of the art. Second, Grabar writes about their reluctance to be specific about where and what the symbols are. Finally, he describes an ‘absence of the contemporary context that ground interpretations in existing literary documents, which would prevent the unavoidable impression of modern constructs, perhaps valid to the modern man, applied to traditional forms’.3

These points, whilst valid, highlight a difficult impediment for conventional art historians, namely, their heavy reliance on direct and explicit textual evidence to generate an understanding of Islamic art and architecture.4 Does this approach fail to reference the wider intellectual context including other types of literature? Is this attitude problematic because it assumes that any kind of theoretical approach to art presupposes a Vitruvian style written manifesto?1 I agree with Necipoğlu’s argument that the absence of textual evidence does not prove that art and architecture were not informed by an aesthetic theory – it simply suggests it was not written about in the same manner as their European contemporaries did.2 Such issues are alluded to by Grabar in his Islamic Art and Beyond, where he asks, ‘Is it legitimate to suggest a culturally accepted symbolism for visual forms as long as, in a highly verbal culture of traditional Islam, written sources give it explicit mention so rarely and require an esoteric approach to literature for demonstration?’3 He responds slightly ambiguously, noting that the exception lies in the art of writing, where a whole range of meanings, from direct sign to the most elaborate symbol, have been accepted. He concludes by stating: ‘I am far less certain whether such matters as the theories of colour in mystical thought, for instance, actually did correspond to the uses of colour in artistic creativity. But this, perhaps, is a matter of insufficient research.’4 Indeed, as a field of study, the history of Islamic art, and the role of colour therein, is still in its infancy. Specifically, as articulated by Corbin and more recently by Mahmoud, there is a need to reassess colour in Islamic art and to examine it from a more integrated perspective, one that attempts to understand what colour meant in relation to the Islamic artist’s worldview.

Perennialism and the Symbolism of Colour

Despite the criticism articulated by some art historians, it is the Perennialist authors who have given the philosophical and spiritual understanding of colour in Islamic art the most attention. Whilst they have not written any books directly related to colour in Islamic art, a collection of their writings from various books and articles make up a small but worthy body of knowledge. Driven by a keen interest in Sufism, authors such as Nasr, Lings, Ardalan and Bakhtiar have sought to illustrate how art and mystical experience are inextricably linked within the premodern Islamic world. A fundamental aspect of this mystical experience is the idea that light and colour are amongst the greatest symbols of divine unity. These authors assert that what they describe as ‘traditional’ (premodern) Muslims essentially saw colour as a polarisation of light and, in the same way, that light in its undifferentiated state symbolised the divine and the colours symbolised the various aspects or polarisations of the divine.1

Nasr asserts that light is the most dominant feature of Persian and Islamic architecture and comments: ‘Colours were used in Persian art very judiciously and with the awareness of both the symbolic meaning of each colour and the total response evoked in the soul through the presence and combination of harmonization of colours.’2 Nasr further expands on this in his foreword to Ardalan and Bakhtiar’s book The Sense of Unity: The Sufi Tradition in Persian Architecture, by proposing that the purpose of the traditional use of colour is to evoke a reminiscence of the celestial reality rather than to imitate the natural colour of sensible objects. He explains further: ‘The symbolic meaning of colour must be taken fully into consideration if the inner meaning of Persian art and architecture is to be comprehended.’3 Further work of Nasr’s is also relevant to this study. In his Islamic Art and Spirituality, he mentions colour in passing throughout the book. For example, he writes, ‘The colours used in so many works of art, far from being accidental, are related to their alchemical symbolism as well as the symbolism derived from the Qur’an and the Hadith.’ Yet he does not elaborate. This study aims to take Nasr’s words further and explore the symbolism that Nasr speaks of in relation to the creation and use of coloured glazes in Safavid tiles.1